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Post-Modi, right wing seeks to secure intellectual space

For all its worth, an intellectual discourse in rightwing political thought in modern India has been nearly absent.

| TNN | Updated: Jun 19, 2014, 05:09 IST

There is also hope that the government will push for inclusion of 'nationalist' thought in existing educational apparatus as well.

NEW DELHI: Sitting in a small one room office in the 11, Ashoka Road complex of the BJP, Dr Anirban Ganguly, director of party-affiliated think tank Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee Research Foundation, talks of some "excellent" Indegenist work (scholarly work that draws from ancient Indian history) that has just been published. He pulls out the books from a lean cabinet behind his desk. For a political thought that claims to find its roots in ancient India and has been fashioning mass movements much before India got independence, it makes for a rather thin library.
For all its worth, an intellectual discourse in rightwing political thought in modern India has been nearly absent. Due to the unchallenged lustre of the Nehruvian consensus and the pressure to conform to it under successive Congress governments, right-wing philosophy could not find enough number of adherents. Its own shortcomings, distrust of the West and the consequent insularity, was another hindrance.

While the Nehruvian stress helped Left liberal thought prosper in India's public institutions, the Indian right chose to focus grassroots mobilization. Consequently, the right in India could never come up with a scholarly body of work to articulate its vision in the intellectual sphere.

Ganguly likes to call it 'academic apartheid'. "Left has turned the idea of nationalism into a pejorative term. Nobody is ready to publish a book written by a nationalist thinker today. All social science institutes are dominated by Left liberals. They never give space to another stream of thought," he says, elaborating how R C Majumdar's reputed 11 volumes of 'The History and Culture of Indian People' had to be brought out without much government support.

All this may change soon though. Thanks to a BJP government favourably disposed to creating intellectual space for rightwing political thought. An evidence of this has been visible in the importance it has given to former bureaucrats and officers associated with rightwing institutions. Ajit Doval, Nripendra Misra and P K Mishra, who have all been given key positions in the government, have been associated with the Vivekananda International Foundation, a rightwing think tank established five years ago.

(Nripendra Misra)

There is also hope that the government will push for inclusion of 'nationalist' thought in existing educational apparatus as well. "We need to have our own institutions. We need to nurture a corpus of intellectuals. But more importantly, there is a dire need for opening up of intellectual discourse, for creating a level playing field. This will have to begin with existing public institutions. There should not be a fear among scholars in a public institute that if they take a rightwing line, their promotion will be stopped," says Ganguly.

There are others in the right flank who think there would be little need to push nationalist thought as "it's an idea whose time has come". Shaurya Doval, director of India Foundation that rigorously articulated Narendra Modi's economic ideas in the run-up to the polls, says, "The burgeoning middle-class (at 400 million and counting) will fuel rightwing thought. After all, they have made a big contribution in Narendra Modi's victory. As the middle class acquires prosperity, it will think of identity which will help creation of an independent discourse."

Sociologist Dipankar Gupta, however, says challenging the well-established culture of Left liberal institutes may not be easy but space could be created in newer institutions. He, though, argues that there isn't a leftwing or rightwing political stream in India in the real sense of the term. "In the political stream for the last couple of decades now, there has been no Leftist thought in economy or strategic affairs. Rightwing has ruled there- be it a Congress or a BJP government. It's only in the socio-cultural sphere that rightwing is still trying to find space," he says.

There are others, however, who feel influencing institutions would be of little help. Atul Mishra, assistant professor at Central University of Gujarat, argues that experience indicates creating institutions with rightwing orientation would not necessarily help create intellectual discourse. "Historically, Indian institutions have rarely been sources of original insights on politics. During the initial decades of independence, for example, most institutions elaborated and articulated the Nehruvian consensus on foreign policy and domestic politics," says Mishra.

The only exception is sociologist Ashish Nandy who first said secularism had no cultural connect in India. Not surprisingly, the nationalists consider Mahatma Gandhi their biggest icon after Swami Vivekananda. "It would be wrong to say nationalists did not create an intellectual stream. Both Vivekananda and Gandhi wrote reams of literature. See how much Narendra Modi speaks of Gandhi," says J K Bajaj, director of Centre for Policy Studies that has brought out several books on "nationalist" thought.

There are others, however, who concede rightwing's disconnect with intellectual discourse. K G Suresh of Vivekananda International Foundation blames Leftist discrimination and the RSS's aversion to English for this. But he is hopeful of largescale change. "We have just published five volumes of 'History of Ancient India' in English. History has to be nationalized. The Left has been politically sidelined. It is now going to happen in the intellectual sphere. Not by discrimination, though," he says, adding, "Till now we were the fringe. Now it's their turn."

Bajaj, however, argues for empiricals taking over ideology in the sphere of social science research. "In the past 40-50 years, India has been intellectually barren, largely because research has been tethered to ideology. I hope once this government comes into its own, there will be less focus on ideology and more on what needs to be done in the sphere of research," he says.

Even as Bajaj's hope gels with what Modi has been saying throughout his campaign, Mishra sums up, "It's not so much about a new vision of politics for our times. The contemporary rightwing in India will argue that politics is not about vision but about management of human affairs. However, this is part of a global trend to which Indian politics, including that of the right, seems increasingly to be conforming."

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